The Mansions

By David Schmidt
Special to Main Line Life

If there is anything for which the world knows the Main
Line, it's the mansions.

From 1880 to perhaps 1930 the newly rich built huge
mansions to honor their unbelievable wealth. Author
James Michener caught the spirit in a 1950 article
in Holiday Magazine. "Life in the golden era
was just about perfect, if one had a lot of money.
The winter was
spent in Florida. ln summer a few families moved to
Newport, hut most preferred the
more sedate and rural life of Bar H arbor. Most families
kept a city dwelling in Philadelphia's
famed Rittenhouse Square. And the rest of the time they
lived in their palaces along the
Main Line. These massive and sprawling homes were fabulous,"
he said.

But these mansions were the product of the Pennsylvania
railroad in more ways than one. The tracks created
a transportation route to Philadelphia, and when regular
passenger service got efficient, the appeal of the
rural areas could be fulfilled. The first people to
build there were the railroad tycoons officers of
the Pennsylvania Railroad and their wealthy friends.

"It began on the main Line because the Main Line
became accessible from Philadelphia," says Jim
Garrison, a local architect and historian. "The
first people that really came out here were the executives
from the Pennsylvania Railroad and the associated companies,
such as the Baldwin Locomotive Works, the various steel
companies and they all lived near each other, and actually
on land they got from the railroad. As the railroad
fine-tuned its right-of-way, it bought up farms and
sold off the left-over land at first to executives
then to developers and speculators," he says.

The area was still bucolic, but the industrial growth
had affected it, for the most part negatively. "But
farming had pretty much tired itself out. There were
a few old families, but this was not really the place
to be," he says. "Even in its denuded
state which you see in the old photographs, there were
no trees, there was nothing the hills and the streams
and the valleys still made it a very pretty place."

It wasn't that the Main Line had been abandoned. "There
were some old families out here, like the Roberts on
City Line, who had always been there. The Evans family
in Haverford had been here forever, but they did have
an interest in the railroad and they brought out people
like Cassatt. So most of the lot of the industrialists
and entrepreneurs had risen up from the ranks in the
city or were from elsewhere," he says.

The new Main Line wasn't created by those who were already
there, it was created by this latest group. They were
an immigrant group coming into the Main Line much like
other earlier groups had, although these immigrants
were more escapees from the city, and of course, they
were extraordinarily rich.

"This was their reward for being successful.
They could afford to leave the factory behind. "But
they did mix well with Quakers a lot of the land was
still in Penn's Land Grant. But the Quakers as a group
seemed to be very good at mixing in and sometimes even
moving out of the way," he says.

"The original Quakers, if they were still wealthy,
had that wealth in land. "The Roberts, for instance,
became wealthy because they had the foresight to invest
in a lot of industries when they were very young. The
Roberts were heavily involved in the iron industry,
which became the steel industry," he says.

"George Roberts then bought into the Pennsylvania
Railroad, and became, I think, the third president
of it," he says. "You can't underestimate
what a force the railroad was in this area, and even
nationally," he says. "The Pennsylvania
Railroad was really preeminent," he says.

In its heyday the mansions were almost all built with
railroad money. "In one way or another the were
tied to the railroad. If you look at Grey's Lane in
Haverford, that was the Evans' land. Clement Griscom
had 150 acres. There was Cassatt, and a whole series
of people who are directly or indirectly tied to it,"
he says. "Either through the banks or the company's
that provided the steel or rolling stock or shipped
on it," Garrison says.

That began to change when other wealthy people decided
to join the railroad barons. "Probably in the
late 1880s to 1890s others came because at that very
time is when you began to have the middle and upper
middle class developments in Wayne. It's interesting
to see that the real suburban development that you
associate with of a modern suburb happened either in
Wayne or in Overbrook," he says.

Originally the estates were just summer houses, but
technology changed that. "The greater reliability
of the transportation and that the city was really
becoming a much less pleasant place to be. Rittenhouse
Square was the place to live, but just up on Spring
Garden Street was the Baldwin Locomotive Works with
30,000 employees, and the associated dirt and noise"
Garrison says.

"The initial idea was to get away in summer,
for health reasons, and then it eventually became year
round," he says. The developers and speculators
built hotels to get the wealthy out of the city during
the summer hear, a definitely unhealthy time when people
who could get away did."The period of the hotels
was incredibly short, I think the Bryn Mawr Hotel also
most from day one was used by the Baldwin School in
the off season, and pretty much ceased operating as
a hotel around the turn of the century," he says.

The dynamics of this group was very narrow. "It
was largely a combination of the Quakers, the Scotch
Irish a pretty Waspish crowd," he says. "A
lot of this was because they were very inbred and clubby.
These people were all directors of each other's companies.
Also, the access to capital to create these companies
didn't happen in a marketplace like we have now, it
was from friends," he says.

So for many members of that "club" in Philadelphia,
you had to have a place on the Main Line. And they
quickly went from summer home to primary residence.
For one thing, they could get to work quickly. "The
commute was a fast or faster than it is now,"
Garrison says.But the cars weren't filled with junior
account executives and lawyers aiming for to be the
newest partner. They were filled with those partners,
their bankers, their clients their neighbors and social
equals.

One reason for this is cost. The steam trains that ran
from the Main Line suburbs were expensive, especially
compared to that other new people hauler, the streetcar.
"There was a major difference in attitude between
streetcar suburbs versus steam-train suburbs,"
he says. "There's a whole separate hierarchy.
If you look at the Elkins Line that ran out towards
Willow Grove, for instance, their riders were middle
class," he says.

These were the lions of industry, living lives better
than any monarch in history. They and their families
were insulated in a way that is impossible today.
Their children went to the same schools, the same colleges,
socialized in each others homes, married each other
and probably never met anyone not of their class who
wasn't a servant.
The women had no need to question the price of anything
they wished to have. With complete control over their
time, they did find good works to accomplish. They
weren't evil people, but there were definitely two
sets of social rules, one for their kind and one for
the rest of the world.

These were the most competitive of America's industrials.
They weren't born to the money, many were middle class,
usually well educated, often as an engineer instead
of as bankers or lawyers. Much of their wealth came
from the lack of control on industry, and the amazingly
cheap cost of labor relative to possible profits.
Fortunes were so immense that they belied belief.
That left the tycoons with more money than they could
possibly spend, although many spent millions attempting
to one up each other.

But the income tax changed those fortunes. No longer
could they just grow and grow. It was the signal of
the end of the era. It took huge staff to maintain
these places, 10 to 30 in the house and perhaps 30
to 50 more grounds keepers," he says. "There's
a great story of a later president of the railroad
who had everybody out to his gentleman's farm and served
them milk. They asked why they weren't getting champagne,
and he responded that the milk cost more," Garrison
says.

Another part of the phenomenon was that these people
may have had a lot of money but that didn't necessarily
convert to a lot of taste. What they built was often
designed to impress, or followed the latest fad in
architecture. Not only that, most of these mansions
remained in families for only a short time.

"One of the reasons so few survive is that these
were for the nuevo riche. It was first and second generation
money. There are practically no examples of a second
generation that lived in the same house," he
says. "The almost always moved elsewhere, but
they didn't want the dark pile that there father built,
they wanted something colonial or newer and brighter,"
he says.

But all has gone now. Not just the houses, but for the
most part the families. In the later part of the nineteen
century they bought these large parcels sometimes
hundreds of acres but they lasted for one or maybe
two generations.

Between the application of income tax, The stock market
crash and new costs for businesses social and safety
programs that came about because of the New Deal, the
great fortunes were in decline.

"Of the of the great houses built between 1880
1920 perhaps five to 10 percent are left. Of the newer
perhaps 30 or 40 percent: with a significant number
are an institutional use," Garrison says. Even
many of the families are gone. "There are very
few left here. It seems they're disappearing. There
was always something about these families that they
keep to themselves. The ones that are around you don't
notice and the rest have moved on."

But many of the mansions remains, albeit in different
form than when they were built. Probably the most
enduring is one of the few that remains as a great
estate in private hands. That also makes it the most
important, in one sense, because it remains as it was
a century ago and has not evolved or been torn down
as the rest have.

That is Maybrook in Wynnewood. "What is so incredible
is it still has 50 acres of land in Wynnewood and is
still a private house," he says. It was built
for Henry Gibson the father of Gibson gin.

"The other survivor unfortunately is getting
carved up now, and that's Ardrossan in Radnor Township
"it was assembled by the Montgomery family in
1870s and when it was owned by Hope and Edgar Scott
was 600-and-some acres until a couple of years ago.
Hope Scott, of course, it remembered most for being
the model of Katherine Hepburn's heroine in the movie
The Philadelphia Story.

Clement Griscom's Dolobran

Dolobran was an evolving mansion built by architects
Furness and Evans from 1881 and 1895. During this time,
there was constant construction, as the plan and variation
of styles shows.

Much of the change came about because Clement Griscom
had a large and growing collection of Old Master and
late 19th century paintings and wanted in insure that
it could be housed properly in the mansion. After his
death, the inventory of an auction of his collection
lists works by Rembrandt, Canaletto, Constable, van
Dyck, Monet, and the sister of one of his neighbors,
Mary Cassatt.

Over 15 years the Dolobran estate grew to almost 150
acres. Containing formal and informal gardens, farm
buildings and pastures, and a golf course. The main
house shows Furness working in the "stick style,"
a mode favored for resort architecture, and practiced
by his mentor, Richard Morris Hunt, in his Newport
cottages.

By the mid-1880s, the house had doubled in size and
was sprouting towers and the Furness trademark chimneys.
By 1890, the"shingle and stick styles" were
giving way to more substantial stone construction.

Dolobran encompassed a floor area of over one-half acre
spread across five levels as the house rambled across
the gently sloping site. The building that remains
is a fascinating chronicle of changing tastes of the
late Victorian era.

Alan Wood, Jr.'s Woodmont
Alan Wood, Jr. was the grandson of James Wood, who founded
an iron rolling mill in Conshohocken in 1832 and became
president of the huge Alan Wood Steel Company.

A towering ego, who named both his business and his
home after himself, Wood now owned many acres on what
may be the highest point along the river in Lower Merion
Township. There was a 15 to 20 mile panorama of the
Schuylkill valley, including a view of the Wood steel
mill down in Conshohocken. His house, Woodmont, would
become they archetypical owner's mansion above the
mill visible to all the poorly paid and overworked
employees.

Wood commissioned Philadelphia architect, William L.
Price, to design Woodmont. The house was constructed
between 1891 and 1894 in the style of a French Gothic
chateau.

Price took advantage of his spectacular site. He stretched
the series of buildings across the ridgeline, beginning
with the barn, a lodge and then the manor house, using
locally quarried stone. This roof is the tallest peak
of a small mountain range consisting of turrets, gables
and tall chimneys. It is truly a precocious building
for a 30 year old architect, no doubt encouraged by
a client who didn't mind ostentation.

Wood's widow thought the house was too isolated and
sold the property to a nephew, Richard G. Wood. In
1929, he subdivided 73 acres, which included the manor
house and five support buildings, and sold it to J.
Hector McNeal, a corporation lawyer known also for
his horsemanship.

The estate was neglected for a number of years after
the death of Mrs. McNeal. In 1953, the house and acreage
was sold to the followers of Father Divine. They established
the country estate of Father Mother Divine as The Mount
of the House of the Lord it is a part of Father Divine's
International Peace Mission Movement and serves as
its spiritual headquarters.

In 1998, Woodmont was designated a National Historic
Landmark. Woodmont is open to the public on Sundays
from April through October, without charge. Guests
can enjoy the first floor of the manor house and visit
Father Divine's shrine.

Ballytore
The battlements of Isaac Clothier's Ballytore made
the Wynnewood residence a castle. This towered stone
fortress of a house by architect Addison Hutton bristled
with a turrets, topped by what appear to have been
a sentry gatehouse at each comer.

On 60 acres that had been Henry Morris' Maple Grove
farm in Wynnewood, this assignment doubtless had special
significance for Hutton, "the Quaker architect
of Bryn Mawr," who was at the apex of his career.

Henry Morris, Clothier's son-in-law (by then living
next door at Fairhill) had been Hutton's first client
and earliest patron. Morris saw to it that the architectural
career of this rural upstate lad was launched three
decades earlier: he had young Hutton design the Morris
family "cottage" at Newport.

The Agnes Irwin school was located there from 1933 until
1960. In 1963, following some structural changes, Ballytore
was converted into Saint Sahag & Saint Mesrob Armenian
Church.